Don't fflush(stdout) when it's not helpful

This patch arose from a discussion started by Jim Meyering's patch
whose intention was to provide better diagnostics for failed writes.
Linus proposed a better way to do things, which also had the added
benefit that adding a fflush() to git-log-* operations and incremental
git-blame operations could improve interactive respose time feel, at
the cost of making things a bit slower when we aren't piping the
output to a downstream program.

This patch skips the fflush() calls when stdout is a regular file, or
if the environment variable GIT_FLUSH is set to "0".  This latter can
speed up a command such as:

GIT_FLUSH=0 strace -c -f -e write time git-rev-list HEAD | wc -l

a tiny amount.

Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 40 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/write_or_die.c b/write_or_die.c
index 5c4bc8515..e125e11d3 100644
--- a/write_or_die.c
+++ b/write_or_die.c
@@ -1,5 +1,45 @@
 #include "cache.h"
 
+/*
+ * Some cases use stdio, but want to flush after the write
+ * to get error handling (and to get better interactive
+ * behaviour - not buffering excessively).
+ *
+ * Of course, if the flush happened within the write itself,
+ * we've already lost the error code, and cannot report it any
+ * more. So we just ignore that case instead (and hope we get
+ * the right error code on the flush).
+ *
+ * If the file handle is stdout, and stdout is a file, then skip the
+ * flush entirely since it's not needed.
+ */
+void maybe_flush_or_die(FILE *f, const char *desc)
+{
+	static int skip_stdout_flush = -1;
+	struct stat st;
+	char *cp;
+
+	if (f == stdout) {
+		if (skip_stdout_flush < 0) {
+			cp = getenv("GIT_FLUSH");
+			if (cp)
+				skip_stdout_flush = (atoi(cp) == 0);
+			else if ((fstat(fileno(stdout), &st) == 0) &&
+				 S_ISREG(st.st_mode))
+				skip_stdout_flush = 1;
+			else
+				skip_stdout_flush = 0;
+		}
+		if (skip_stdout_flush && !ferror(f))
+			return;
+	}
+	if (fflush(f)) {
+		if (errno == EPIPE)
+			exit(0);
+		die("write failure on %s: %s", desc, strerror(errno));
+	}
+}
+
 int read_in_full(int fd, void *buf, size_t count)
 {
 	char *p = buf;